Geography and Family
Following Valentine’s (2008) call for geographies of families that don’t subsume family within concepts such as social reproduction and care, there have been a growing number of studies exploring how families are enmeshed in spacings of transnational migration (e.g., Pratt 2012), home (e.g., Harker 2010; Stenning et al.
2010), the (post)colonial nation-state (e.g., Oswin 2010), and law and borders (e.g., Martin 2012), while being part of a broader array of intimate relations and spaces (e.g., Valentine et al. 2012; Sharma 2012). This work provides a much- needed corrective to the prioritization of, and focus on, individual subjects and processes of individuation that has characterized much social science scholarship in recent decades.Valentine (2008: 2099) argues that the historical neglect of families as an object of geographical study can be tied, in part, to a feminist and queer politics of rejection of a particular type of family: “traditional patriarchal and hetero-normative models of ‘the family’.” The reasons for this rejection are clear: such normative family ideals, and the practices they promote, have had and continue to have devastating effects. For example, Oswin’s (2010, 2014) research in Singapore demonstrates how a very powerful statist production of a heteronormative nuclear family ideal, in part through the residential space of the apartment block, creates forms of exclusion that impact on a whole range of nonheteronormative, “queered” subjects (many of which might otherwise be thought about as families, for example, single parents with children, queer couples). In the context of the USA, Cowen and Gilbert (2007) have shown how a particular normative family discourse, put to work in state policy making, constructs a “national family” that is highly exclusionary of both “foreign” others and “deviants” within the national “family” (see also Martin 2012). These studies give credence to suspicions of “the family” as a politically conservative form of collective subjectivity.
Consequently, critique of family often becomes a point of departure for imagining an expanded sphere of intimate relations beyond the family, which might include same-sex intimacies and personal relationships such as friendships and communities (see Valentine 2008 for further elaboration).Geographies that critique the patriarchal, heteronormative family do important political work, exposing the means through which various forms of oppression and exclusion are rooted in and routed through the family (both as it is practiced and as a discursive construction). However, studies that only critique the family as a geographically specific heteronormative ideal overlook other political registers through which other types of families might be critically encountered. This chapter will develop this argument by examining a range of recent studies of Palestinian families, focusing mainly on those living in the occupied Palestinian territories. As will be shown later, attending to this specific context reveals a much more messy and complex array of families and family politics. However, it is first necessary to provide some background on how this context is usually understood in existing geographical literatures.
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