KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
←44 | 45→capitalism and patriarchy. Hartmann argues that while capitalism creates a hierarchal labour structure, patriarchy based on male hegemony determines the ordering of this structure, resulting in women being connected with the private and men with the public.67
It is in the family that women carry out their assigned tasks under the name of supporting men and children, including by cooking, doing laundry, cleaning, and childrearing. However, in socialist and communist movements, women at home were not recognised as a social class and hence their labour in the family was excluded from a discussion in relation to capitalist modes of production. Yet the tasks women carry out are key to sustaining capitalism, as they reserve a free and ready labour force required for production. Marxist feminism enabled the recognition of women as a social class and their labour in the family as part of the economy under capitalism. Eli Zaretsky critiques Juliet Mitchell and Shulamith Firestone’s conceptions of the economy, which he argues signifies ‘the production of goods and services to be sold’.68 For Zaretsky, this conception recognises that a woman hired to cook in a restaurant performs an economic activity, but it does not extend the same recognition to a housewife who cooks for her family. Such an understanding therefore excluded housewives and families from revolutionary politics and the struggle between ‘economic classes’.69 Marxist feminism challenges capitalism’s control of the family and men’s control of women, hence women’s double oppression under the workforce both at home and in public.
The main feminist objection towards the family has been a ‘[c];ritical analysis of the family, and efforts to change traditional family arrangements’, which inflicted upon women oppressions including domesticity, marriage, reproduction, and childrearing.70 Family has long been associated with the biological, natural and universal, as it is considered the domain of birth, nurturing, and other such events. This understanding was promoted by the nineteenth-century evolutionists who associated women with ‘an unchanging biological role’ while viewing men as ‘the ←45 | 46→agents of all social processes’.71 The term biological family, which was built upon the biological distinction between men and women, underwent a vigorous challenge and critique from radical feminism.
The start of the second-wave feminist movement in the early 1960s radically questioned the main reasons behind women’s oppression in the family and larger society. During this time, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Germaine Greer introduced a wide range of theoretical perspectives that called for a radical approach to feminism, one that considered biological differences between men and women as the main reason for the oppression and exploitation of the latter. The family is where women’s sexuality and reproduction are controlled by biology. In the patriarchal systems of family and society, men benefit from the daily support of women directly, and so create and contribute to situations in which women are oppressed. Therefore, radical feminists also hold men responsible for female subordination. In the late 1960s, radical feminists in the United States argued that patriarchy was evident in all societies as the root of gender oppression. For them, patriarchy was perpetuated by the family, which they argued needed to be abolished in order to remove the conditions that oppressed women.72 In the early 1970s, Firestone proposed pregnancy and motherhood as the conditions that create women’s exploitation and oppression. As a solution, she envisioned a post-patriarchal society in which ‘tyranny of the biological family would be broken’ and where ‘[t];he reproduction of the species by one sex […] would be replaced by […] artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either’.73 Although Firestone’s solution of alternative reproduction methods was found to be utopian in the following decades, her discussion was essential in demystifying the relation between reproduction, motherhood, and patriarchy, and in enabling other critics to explore these concepts. Radical feminists offered ‘new reproductive technologies’, advocated ‘opting out of family’, and proposed ‘separatism from men’ as solutions to end women’s oppression.74 These suggestions, though radical in mood, opened the path for ←46 | 47→exploration of alternative kinship and human relations that can be considered within the context of non-normative families.
During the 1970s, feminist criticism took a new direction, one that expanded existing criticism into a psychoanalytical approach.75 This led feminists to analyse the family in relation to early childhood experiences, motherhood, childrearing, and reproduction. The studies of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein focused on understanding ‘inequality between sexes, certain differences between the sexes, and misogyny originating from prevailing child rearing arrangements’.76 For psychoanalytical feminists, gender inequalities were based on an individual’s unique psycho-sexual development, not their biological differences. Early childhood experiences were key to the construction and promotion of gender roles in wider society, as boys and girls learn to be different by internalising the traits of masculinity and femininity that they witness in adults. Chodorow highlights the centrality of mothers in orienting boys and girls into different developmental paths. For example, boys learn to separate themselves from their mothers and identity with their fathers, and hence assume male supremacy. This departure results in boys developing autonomy and a less dependent persona, and reduces their capability for intimate and emotional relationships, which in turn suits them better as they mature and enter the public domain and assume their role as breadwinners. On the other hand, girls are not allowed to identify with their fathers but only with their mothers, which makes them less prepared for life in the public sphere but better suited to private spaces, including the family. They are also taught to perform traits of intimate personal and emotional relationships such as nurturing, care, and support.77 The solution identified by psychoanalytic feminists was dual parenting, which they envisioned would enable children to break away from viewing parenthood in a gender-categorised way. As ←47 | 48→a consequence, children would be able to experience both parents as self and other, and participate equally in private and public domains.
Gay Men, Lesbians and the Family
The very formation of the traditional family is built upon heterosexuality, so it could not historically accommodate gay men and lesbians. Starting from early childhood experiences, boys and girls are raised successively in line with the image of the dominant man and the submissive woman. Early on, children are indoctrinated into playing with the ‘right’ toys, those that connote boyishness and girlishness, even when these do not correlate with the individual child’s inclinations. When it comes to their adolescence, they are ‘expected to prove [themselves] socially to [their] parents as members of the right sex by either being a “right” man (oppressive) or a “right” woman (oppressed)’.78 According to heteropatriarchal ideology, a ‘right’ man is attracted to women; a ‘right’ woman is attracted to men. The attributes of hegemonic masculinity and femininity and heterosexuality embodied in the traditional family are presented as biological and hence unchangeable. Therefore, any deviation from these attributes is met with alarm and considered within the range of ‘abnormality’. As such, people who do not conform have been labelled as ‘deviants’, ‘neurotic’, ‘sick’, or ‘bent’, and as a potential threat to the family unit and social stability. Consequently, gay men and lesbians have been thrown out of their homes, not allowed to have family, pressurised into marriage, ostracised from social groups and sent to psychiatrists who historically deemed same-sex desire a mental disorder to be treated. For example, APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included homosexuality as a sexual deviation in the form of a pathologic behaviour from the first edition in 1952 up until 1973.79 The term was updated when the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council declared homosexuality not an illness. Gay people contested the claim that differences between men and women were normal, viewing it as propaganda of the patriarchal family and sexism, rather than the truth. In this way, they stepped out of the traditional notion of the family arrangement and rejected gender roles designed by society. Their critique of