Family: In good times and bad…

* Photo: Meltem Ulusoy / csgorselarsiv.org

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

It is very meaningful to begin a podcast series as part of a project on "living together in good times and bad" with family. Because family is a social phenomenon which presents the paradigmatic example of being together "in good times and bad", just as it is expressed in the marriage contract, and which, in other words, perfectly represents the ideal of "unity".

You can listen to the first episode (Family) of the "In Good Times and Bad: Living Together" podcast (in Turkish) here: Spotify, ApplePodcast, Youtube

Family as such is seen as the smallest unit or building block that both founds the family and society and underpins the political unity. This idea of unity, which is established between women and men and reinforced by the children reproduced by them, has turned heterosexual reproduction into the founding principle of the human society. What is more, the existence of forms of political unity based on the continuation and survival of ethnic-national existence focuses on this. In brief, dominant ideologies have been lecturing for centuries that family, society and state are a whole.

However, that dominant ideologies depict family as the most indispensable element in the life of an individual, society and state and within a perfect holism and consistency should not cause us to overlook the complicated structure and tensions of family-centered community. On the one hand, these familistic and nationalist-statist narratives of dominance construct and represent the reality that we live in; on the other hand, they hide, veil, distort and repress several things that do not fit the official narrative.

Family and society

The nature of the relationship between family and social unity is essentially very complicated. On the one hand, family-kinship historically emerged as the essential way of forging a bond between conflicting elements. It forms a basic bond between not only women and men, but essentially between the opponents "who give and take" or "exchange" women and male "strangers". The friendships established among men via kinship can be considered the founding element of patriarchal civilization.

As a matter of fact, we can say that the development of civilization was from the smallest units of kinship into larger ones; humans organized as larger units. And as the larger and more complicated the units became, the deeper the inequalities got; some families came to the fore as the nobility and ruling dynasties over others. Moreover, the systems of family-kinship, as the basis of the organization of production and reproduction, also created the condition of standing together as an economic unity as well as appropriating labor.

On the other hand, in human society, which cannot possibly stand together solely based on the obligation to work, a vital function has also been attributed to family as the place of needed love, care and solidarity, so, as "home". Therefore, the bonds forged with family have been considered the focus of affinity among people, beyond underpinning the economic and political bond or as its condition. All these are phenomena that show the close bond between family and community; however, they shed light on only a small part of the truth.

What is the reality of family?

But what is the reality of family beyond all these forms and constructs of unity? To begin with, we know that any construct of unity is possible only thanks to some founding exclusions and forms of contingent exclusion. We can say that there are two founding externalities excluded by the family form based on compulsory heterosexuality. One of them is the idea of marriage between people of the same gender and the other one is the forms of different intimacy-close relationships formed outside the marriage-family form. In modern age, family has claimed to monopolize the incorporation of almost all intimate relationships and its relationship with the forms other than itself has always been rife with tension and conflict.

We see that there are some structural tensions between modern society and politics in terms of not only close relationships, but belonging, obedience and solidarity as well. The question of whether political belonging is to be established through family-kinship and small community or through an individual's compact of citizenship has been a main source of tension in the modern period. Family does not always serve as the prop of the state or the political power regime in every context or by necessity. The tension between the state and family led the family to assume the duty of a shelter from the regime in totalitarian-repressive regimes, for instance, in the Stalin-era Soviet regime. Similarly, in the period of slavery in America, family served the function of a protective shelter from racism for blacks, who were not allowed to found a family.

Family: 'The last stronghold'

Family always occupies a critical place in the historical contexts where unionist discourses merge with the exclusionist despotisms at the highest point. To the extent that the idea of family is articulated in racist, nationalist and statist discourses, it has left its own specific mark on the functioning of these exclusionist discourses. This specific mark typically revolves around cultural concerns about the degeneration of ethnic-national existence and demographic fears about reproduction. Especially in cases where the concerns about continuation and survival increase and the perception of threat by an outside power rises, family has been regarded as the "last stronghold", which is to be protected as the essence of national existence and to be defended in the face of cultural degeneration and the fall of which means death.

'Like a special contract of slavery'

The most basic conflict veiled by the familistic rhetoric is undoubtedly an essential antagonism taken inside the family, transformed and reproduced. One of the two pillars of this conflict regulated/ organized by classical patriarchy is the dominance of men over women and the other is the dominance of old men in the family over children and young people. This dominance is precisely set through this notion of unity. As it was most clearly expressed in the 19th-century English law, a woman and man are "one" in marriage and the man represents this unity. Patriarchal narratives about marriage and family construct the unity that will continue in good times and bad not as an emotional bond forged with a voluntary contract, but like a special contract of slavery forbidden or illicit to terminate no matter what and where women abandon their all rights to men.

The "civil death" the woman found herself in by abandoning her all rights brought about an oddity in the era of democratic revolutions when the public space revitalized with a novel understanding of civil rights and ideal of citizenship and feminism emerged from this incongruity. Since the 19th century, feminism has both served to expose the fact of dominance in family in several aspects and to enable the reality of family to transform and to be established as a unity on a more egalitarian ground. Despite significant achievements, the patriarchal family still persists today as the essential site of dominance over women's body and labor in several places.

Old father-centered model

Throughout the 20th century, the family underwent a big change not only thanks to women's struggle for equality, but depending on other historical transformations as well. With the development of capitalism, family and kinship have ceased to be a vital element of the systems of production. While women's reproductive labor still plays a critical role for capitalism, it is not as compulsory or irreplaceable as before. Moreover, family is not the only or compulsory way to make people fit into social and political regimes or to make them "normal". Media and ideologies assume the important functions of families.

Also, the fact that gay marriage and forms of living together are legally accepted in Western countries as a result of the LGBTI+ struggle and the right to child adoption is finally requested as well shakes the ideal of heteronormative family at its core. A new national and international human rights regime which protects women from violence inside and outside the house and grants children with fundamental rights has put a strain on the old father-centered model. And, ultimately, we witness that the unity of family is not that durable "in times bad" and families dissolve fast under the effect of poverty, unemployment, domestic violence and ethnic-racist discrimination. That being the case, the fact that family does not serve the presumed function of a shelter or prop becomes clear.

Family in the postmodern era

Despite all these and as the very result of these reasons, the idea of family as an institution that perfectly embodies the ideal of unity and organic harmony has been experiencing a revival in the postmodern era. In the face of social disintegration and chaos caused by neoliberal globalization, family is proposed as the most reliable shelter, the only solution and the last stronghold. Having lost its historical and strong foundations, the family is now tried to be kept alive only in reactionary forms. And, once again in history, the family rhetoric is recalled by being strongly articulated in exclusionist and othering discourses.

It was with the new right-wing governments in the 1980s that the familistic policies assumed a new significance. As expressed by the leading new right-wing leader of the time, Margaret Thatcher, who said, "There is no such thing as family, there are individual men and women and there are families", the familistic idea served to realize the exclusionist potentials of the family at the highest level. Articulated in the new right-wing's worship of individualism and the market, familialism stood against all other forms of social unity and solidarity. In the period from the 1980s that began with the new right-wing to the present day, neoliberal policies have nationally and globally mobilized a wide-scale dynamic of social disintegration. It is in the face of the depth of this social disintegration that familialism is now brought up again in a very different way.

Family-centered utopia of resurrection

This time, a new and strong family ideal manifests itself both as a unifying force against the individualistic market dynamics and a reactionary response to the historical gains of women and LGBTI+s. It is also put forward as the bearer of an authoritarian political call against liberal democratic ideas and institutions. "The anti-gender movements" that came to the fore as of 2000s and that have now become a global anti-movement express this very reaction. In the discourses of these movements, we can see how familialism is strongly articulated in right-wing populist authoritarianism and religionist fascistic discourses.

These activists who are in very different countries of the world, but act with a very similar rhetoric argue that they struggle against what they call "gender ideology". They get organized to challenge the notion of "gender" itself, the policies of equality embraced by global powers such as the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU), reproductive rights and especially LGBTI+ rights (such as gay marriages, child adoption and nondiscriminatory sexual orientations). All these are portrayed as a great evil that eradicates the family and jeopardizes the continuation and survival of ethnic-national existence.

Furthermore, the fact that traditional gender roles and binary gender regime based on the binary of women-men have weakened is condemned as the harbinger of a post-human dystopia which will toll the death knell for the human species and human civilization. This family-centered utopia of resurrection, which is put forward in the face of cultural degeneration and demographic fears about extinction is decked with all types of statist, nationalist, racist exclusions, othering and hate speech on the one hand and with male-dominant and heterosexist discourses on the other. But, at the same time, it positions family where Marx once positioned religion: As the soul of a soulless world, as the hope of a hopeless humanity. And, of course, no matter how much it is denied, it serves the function of "opium of peoples".

Where do we stand, where do we go?

Then, where do we stand? And where do we go from here? The situation where we stand indicates a gravely pathological state in which familistic utopias manifest themselves as a symptom. As always, obsessions with pathological unity, organic integrity and harmony now also stem from the depth of disintegrations operating in the background. There has been a state of disintegration which incorporates us all in its very different forms on mental, social and political levels, but affects us differently. Until recently, this postmodern state was experienced and enthusiastically celebrated, at least by some sections of society, as a liberating process where the old, cumbersome and repressive "modernist" structures disintegrated.

But now, in the face of this situation threatening to destroy "everything that we are, we know and we own", it more commonly lays the ground for anti-modernist sentiments that bring out pessimism and reaction, rather than enthusiasm. The most negative sentiments such as desperation, weakness, frustration, isolation, loss of control, lack of communication, alienation, distancing, competition to the end to survive, concerns about extinction, hostility, grudge and hate surround, shake and split the individual and social constitution. Let alone curing it, the projects of unity and integrity interwoven around family or another essential core both embody our pathology as a symptom of this pathology and bring about a partial and false relief. But essentially, it clings to the disease and resists a real healing, thereby deepening the process of disintegration even further.

But how can we heal?

After identifying all these, there remains a difficult question to answer: But how can we heal? How can we live together like a tree alone and free and like a forest in fraternity? There is of course no simple answer to this, but where the answer is to be sought is obvious. First of all, all deeply buried sources of prejudice, hostility and hate should be uncovered and faced with, of course. But in order to be able to tackle all these painful experiences and to look ahead without being stuck in a traumatic past, it assumes a very vital importance to materialize all bonds of love, care, responsibility, communication, solidarity and cooperation, to revive them and to drive strength from them.

Regardless of where, how much and in what forms they exist, we need to point at them, trace and find, polish and multiply them and bring them into contact, be that in the so-called "traditional" family form, in close relationships and alternative forms of family-household relationships in their all diversity outside family or in imagined communities that are established among "strangers" who do not know one another. Only then will it be possible to crack the door open for the forms of togetherness that do not yet exist, but are about to arise. 

(AÖZ/SO/NÖ/SD)