From House To Home

Synopsis

This feminist-materialist study contributes towards acritique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by lookingback at its cultural constructions and negotiations in earlymodern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics oftoday, the book offers further bricks to the building of a culturalhistory of the meanings and practices of family life in theircontinuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as adiscursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of thefollowing interrelated concepts and categories, each being itselfconstituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender,sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, thepublic and the private, and the nation. While participating inpostmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author alsodialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at thetime of their initial production; i.e., to the historicalspecificity of the socio-economic and political fabric, in particular to therise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.