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Conference Paper Abstracts

Panel 1 | Bourgeois Family Values in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Fairy Godmothers and Other Ghosts in the Victorian Imperial Family Machine
Neville Hoad (University of Texas, Austin)

This is a paper about stuckness, both narrative and experiential: a series of speculations on Victorian imaginings of broken families, families struggling do the work of social reproduction. It will focus on what needs to be brought in from elsewhere in order to get the family form moving, situating its speculations in two iconic figures in two canonical but highly idiosyncratic novels - Miss Havisham in Dickens's Great Expectations (1861)and Dorian Gray in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891). Miss Havisham's stuckness imagines futurity in the terms of revenge as repetition with a difference: Estella Havisham will do what her adopted mother had done to her. Dorian's stuckness imagines itself as a kind of partially valorized narcissism that can hold the future at bay, while haunted by the inexorable progress of a hidden portrait. Both novels are centrally concerned with the problem of producing narratives of personal and social continuity when sexuality is not reducible to reproduction, and offer mentoring, collecting, speculating and mirroring as substitutes for heterosexual reproductivity. Kinship structures in these novels need fairy godmother figures, often with imperial connections, to restore moral and representational order – Magwitch, Lord Henry, James Vane. This paper will suggest that the narrative trajectories of these imaginary people, now archived in many other places than their “originating” novels, mark the persistence of stuckness as a solution to itself as it breaks, in order to maintain, the family as the organizing unit for imagining a future.

Good Wives: The Marriage Market and the Feminine Ideal in Colonial Bengal
Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago)

In the vast literary production associated with the educated milieu of late nineteenth century colonial Bengal, there was an obsessive investment with the traits deemed desirable in a good wife. In most literary tracts of this period – starting from texts that are conventionally regarded as literature, namely novels, short stories and poetry to the fragmentary world of matrimonial advertisements – there was an almost excessive investment in considerations of questions such as: Who was an ideal housewife, an ideal daughter-in-law, and an ideal helpmeet to her husband? This paper considers two strands of this literary output - advice manuals for women and matrimonial advertisements - to understand the qualities and comportment that were regarded as most suitable in an eligible bride during this period. I suggest that a woman who made a perfect wife to the educated, modern, Bengali man was not necessarily someone who was also a good daughter-in-law. Despite their apparent differences – differences that had to do with who authored these two kinds of texts, their intended publics, and their actual formal structure and texture – these texts belonged to the “marriage market” that came into being during this period and were in keeping with what some historians have called a “new patriarchy” that consolidated itself in late colonial Bengal.

Statistical Fact, Feminist Fiction, Imperial Experience: Arguments over Marriage and Divorce at the Union for Truth, Paris, 1909
Jean Pederson (University of Rochester)

On 14 March 1909, fifteen French men and women met in Paris to argue over the pros and cons of marriage and divorce at the Union for Truth. Divorce had been available for a limited number of causes since 1884; the political leaders of the Third Republic had just taken one step closer toward no-fault divorce by providing that either partner in a separated couple could now obtain a divorce on demand after a three-year waiting period. The academics, novelists, journalists, and judges who assembled for this fifth of six sessions in a year-long series on women's legal and economic situation were eager to determine whether the new law was a symptom of or a solution for the problem they identified as a “marriage crisis.” Aside from the event's inherent historical interest as a moment where men and women from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and political positions met to argue over whether or not divorce should be easier to obtain, the records of the meeting also suggest some broader questions about how to evaluate the relative intellectual contributions of fields as diverse as sociology, statistics, law, and literature. Although it took place in Paris, it also raises questions about the relationship between France and her colonies because one of the most eloquent speakers made elaborate reference to his experiences in law courts overseas. Finally, the debate took place at a moment when boundaries between social science, social activism, and socially-conscious literature were particularly fluid. For this reason, the original arguments at the Society for Truth still raise a variety of questions about the ways in which we think about truth today.

Panel 2 | Family Values In Flux: The Cold War and Welfare State Eras

East is West: Sexuality, Temporality and the Indian Penal Code
Anjali Arondekar (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Invocations of time and space are central to legal theorizations of homosexuality in India. From colonial sodomy statutes, to post-colonial anti-sodomy legal reform, homosexuality is recuperated through its attachments to a temporal elsewhere.  It is and is not of the “East;” it is and is not of the “West,”  a legal spectre that resides ambivalently in time and space.  In this paper, I examine the critical labor of temporality and spatiality ("in whose time and space?") within legal theorizations of homosexuality, and the genealogical peculiarities that such turns bring.  Some of the questions I will raise are:  If homosexuality is scripted as paradoxically familiar and unfamiliar, relational and remote, what are the  challenges for legal codification? What significance does the overwhelming legal focus on native pederasty during the nineteenth century have for the representations and struggles of contemporary legal reform?

Female Narcissism and the Event of Woman in the Clash Over Early 20 th-Century Chinese Family Values
Tani Barlow (University of Washington)

This essay considers three historical incidents as a way of describing how central the Event of women was to 1920s debates over Chinese family values and, also, how vital the family values debates proved in 20th century Chinese politics as such. These episodes are (1) Pan Guangdan’s 1922 preemptive account of Chinese women’s psychosexual abnormality (cangcu cengwen, yu Xiao Qing zhi xing xinli biantai) in his “Feng Xiaoqing: yijian yingbian zhi yanjiu,” (Feng Xiaoqing: A study in narcissism); (2) early 1920s discussions in thematic issues of the leading opinion journal of the day, The Ladies Journal (Funv zazhi) on marriage and divorce; and (3) the post-1927 sexual mutilation and extermination of thousands of young workers active or suspected of having been active in the Communist inspired national women’s movement. What particularly stoked the ferocity of family values politics (and the violence of clashes over modern small family formation) was the Event of woman. I will make a minimum of two further arguments. First, the theoretical or ideological scission that 1920s’theories of women foreshadowed was certainly a traumatic national and international colonial modernist occurrence. Second, the 1920s Event of women has got to be seen in relation to the commercial, capitalist styles of everyday life that situated modern Chinese women as subject in a visual world of commodity consumption. If time permits I will raise a third point. The Maoist vision of women’s liberation -- its resexualized styles of dress, affect, public life, family formation, scientific veracity, modernity and sociology – precisely and negatively parallels the commodification and public eroticization of the bourgeois small family of the 1920s.

The Gender of Anti-Americanism and Anti-Europeanism
Mary Nolan (New York University)

As Europeans, especially Germans looked at the U.S. and debated whether Americanization was desirable or possible or inevitable in both the interwar era and in the first two postwar decades, they worried extensively about issues of gender and sexuality, above all about that problematic figure “the American woman.” By the 1970s those concerns dropped out of German/European critiques of America. But on the American side, criticism of Europe from the 1980s missile debates circle around gender issues. It is European masculinity, sexuality, and reproduction that is singled out for attack and ridicule. I want to track these debates, analyze the shifting place and character of gender, and assess what that says about the changing character of European -American relations.

Panel 3 | Whither Family Values?: Analyzing The Present

“Domestic Community” in the Post-Apartheid Moment
Hylton White (University of Chicago)

The ‘crisis’ of the African family is one of the most enduring topics of social thought in South Africa. The architects of apartheid sought legitimacy by arguing that racial separation would protect the customary family from the corrosive ‘detribalization’ of urban labor. For its liberal critics, by contrast, apartheid showed its greatest inhumanity in the way its system of migrant labor broke up African families for extended lengths of time. And now, in the post-apartheid era, AIDS and unemployment provide the grounds for renewed moral panics about the forms of domestic community. From the vantage point of the present moment, this paper looks back at the discourse of crisis surrounding the African family in colonial and apartheid-era South Africa. It also revisits an older kind of analysis, widely rejected now, that treated migrant labor under apartheid as the articulation of two different modes of production, domestic and capitalist. The present moment allows us to recuperate dimensions of that analysis, I argue here—and to make it cast light, not just on South African history, but also on the structural foundations for the existence of a politics of family values in capitalist societies much more broadly.

Transnational Family Values
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (University of California, Davis)

The transnational family is a “new” family form in the Philippines, one that formed in response to the economic dependency of families on labor migration. Yet, society has not welcomed the formation of transnational families and has instead labeled children raised in such families to be prone to deviance. My talk addresses the cultural and moral anxieties in the Philippines regarding the formation of transnational families with migrant mothers. I call attention to the resistance against the dislodgement of the “ideology of separate spheres” in these transnational families, specifically those brought by the geographical distance of biological mothers from her children as well as the greater income earning power of women in these families. As I show, these anxieties over gender [i.e., the advancement of women] and the family mirror those surrounding non-normative households in the United States.

“Family Values,” the New Right, and the Fissioning American Public Sphere
Micaella di Leonardo (Northwestern University)

There is no dearth of careful scholarship on the rise of the American New Right form the 1970s forward. We have documentation and analysis of the shrinkage of our semi-welfare state, the betrayal of civil rights, women's movement, gay rights, and environmental accomplishments. The ideological shift allowing these betrayals was achieved, as is well known, through Kulturkampf, the deliberate veiling of inegalitarian politics and policies through the construction of (raced, gendered) monsters threatening “mainstream” American cultural values--and particularly, white, heterosexual, married American families. Less remarked, however, are the ongoing guerrilla public sphere wars taking place beneath the radar of white mainstream media. In this paper, I will analyze a decade's evolution of one such guerrilla war: an extraordinarily successful syndicated drive-time black music and comedy radio show, the Tom Joyner Show. Contrary to claims of “black homophobia” and “black antifeminism,” I will document the deliberately feminist- and gay-friendly politics of this popular show and its characters. The success of American New Right Kulturkampf occurs as much through mainstream media collusion as through the fervent agreement of actual “red state” Americans.

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