Mothers and fathers, who needs them?
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75 review essay
mothers and fathers, who needs them? Angela McRobbie
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between life and death Judith Butler; Columbia University press; 2000; pp. 112; Pbk ISBN 0-231-11895-3 d11.95
re-regulating kinship, repudiating feminism What follows in this review essay of Antigone’s Claim:kinship between life and death by Judith Butler is a deliberately wide-ranging, even loose, reading of the text, for the very reason that this short book (three lectures given for the prestigious Wellek annual lectures at University of California, Irvine) points to the need for far-reaching feminist re-attention to questions of family and kinship in contemporary political culture (Butler, 2000). Butler suggests there has been something of a retreat in feminism from fiercely disputing the neoconservatism of current family policies. There has also been, even within feminism, retrospective self-critique of aspects of so-called 1960s sexual politics (e.g. non-monogamy) which have had the effect of warranting a return to more proprietorial partnerships. Butler’s focus is the US, but similar trends exist elsewhere.1 What marks out the uniqueness of this moment then is the co-existence of the emphatic endorsement of traditional family values at the governmental level (we might add to this George Bush’s recent support to the lobby encouraging celibacy among US teenagers) with, at the same time, what looks like a liberalization, in that there is now great diversity in family life, including gay and lesbian households, re-constituted families, families of choice, and simply ad hoc families-of-sorts. However, alongside both these developments there is ‘feminist abeyance’, an unwillingness to be positioned back in the firing line by questioning the very existence of the family as was once the norm (Bagguley quoted in Walby, 2002). My reading of Butler’s Antigone is that it encourages us to recognize that this particular entanglement produces new normativities, new fields of interdiction and constraint. In fact there is a double entanglement that Antigone encourages us
feminist review 75 2003 c 2003 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/03 $15 www.feminist-review.com (129–136)
1 The current New Labour government kindly provides ‘handbooks for living’ to all couples embarking on marriage.
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to confront: the co-existence of neo-liberal with liberal values in relation to families and sexuality, and the co-existence of feminism as that which is reviled or, as I would put it, ‘almost hated’, and feminism as a political force which has achieved the status of Gramscian common sense, something that is now ‘taken into account’(McRobbie, 1999).2 Moving on from Butler, I would suggest that it is in the field of popular culture that some of the most indicative tensions in relation to this double entanglement are played out. How does Antigone figure in this account? Or rather how does a young woman character from Greek drama precipitate such an analysis? In fact her presence in these lectures marks an absolute continuity in Butler’s writing,
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