For those wondering why Trump recently linked a critique of the nuclear family to a critique of whiteness, a thread: The family is the main place where gender, race, and sexuality are constructed in contemporary societies.
Marx and Engels described the family as the place where the division of labor first occurs, and thus, where women are first subjected to discrimination on the basis of gender.
Foucault called the family the interchange of the regime of sexuality and regime of alliance. He meant that the family unit stabilizes power differentials by creating "sexuality" and by turning marriage into a "contract".
...a contract "between men" over the body of a woman, as Gayle Rubin would famously argued.
Rubin called the family the site where the sex/gender system is enacted, the place where gender is established, imprinted onto the body, by culture (not biology).
The family is thus the axis of power transmission in Western cultures. Property is inherited through the family. Women are traded as "property" through marriage (do you take this woman to be your wife? is an exchange of women, as Rubin says), and thus the family.
But this ideal of family is also highly racialized. Native Americans, Black people, and other POC have always been judged against the presumed "norm" of the white nuclear family. Indigenous people were deemed savage precisely because they did not grant property through men.
The ideal of the nuclear family is the product of Christian (in particular Protestant) norm creations and legal structures that policed "deviance" from this norm that was in fact produced by racial violence.
The ruptures of the slave trade; genocide of Native American communities; indentured servitude of Asian immigrants; ICE detention targeting of Latinx migrants and children, are all manifestations of this power dynamic.
The family has to be protected by white people in order to maintain property. All other forms of kinship have to be eradicated in order for that norm to exist unchallenged. Black and Brown people with our breath, with our bodies, challenge this norm. That is what Trump means.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
