Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-13T13:26:34.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Foucault and Familial Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Chloë Taylor
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault's continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist‐Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all‐encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi‐natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

Information

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Winter 2012, pp. 201 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ariès, Philippe. 1988. Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. 1988. Cat's eye. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.Google Scholar
Bell, Vikki. 1993. Interrogating incest: Feminism, Foucault and the law. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Hugh. 2005. Children and childhood in Western society since 1500. Harlow, UK, and New York: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Hugh. 2006. The invention of childhood. London: BBC Books.Google Scholar
Donzelot, Jacques. 19772005. La police des familles. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Duncan, Carol. 1973. Happy mothers and other new inventions in French art. Art Bulletin 55 (December): 570–83.Google Scholar
Feder, Ellen K. 1997. Discipling the family: The case of gender identity disorder. Philosophical Studies 85(2–3): 195–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feder, Ellen K. 2007a. The dangerous individual('s) mother: Biopower, family, and the production of race. Hypatia 22(2): 60–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feder, Ellen K. 2007b. Family bonds: Genealogies of race and gender. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 19611965. Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage. Originally published as Histoire de la folie. Paris: Plon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 19751977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 19761978. The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage. Originally published as La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1982. Le désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille. Paris: Collection Archives, Gallimard Julliard.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1984. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, P.New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 19992004. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1974–1975. New York: Picador. Originally published as Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 20032006. Psychiatric power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Originally published as Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Coll ge de France, 1973–1974. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.Google Scholar
James, Allison. 1997. Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Knowles, Caroline. 1997. Family boundaries: The invention of normality and dangerousness. Toronto: UTP Higher Education.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and pleasures: Foucault and the politics of sexual normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
McWhorter, Ladelle. 2009. Racism and sexual oppression in Anglo‐America: A genealogy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Simons, Jon. 1996. Foucault's Mother. In Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. Hekman, Susan J.University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar