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"Can't My Family Be Real Too?" Deconstructing the Familial Mystique Through History and Narratives
Elliott, Victoria
Elliott, Victoria
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Honors papers, Anthropology and Sociology, Department of, Student research
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Abstract
This project explores how normative understandings based on the nuclear family
ideology interact with individual's constructions of family. In particular, it seeks to
challenge the established illusion of the nuclear family as ideal by re-conceptualizing it as
a familial mystique. Deconstruction of this mystique begins with an examination of
history, as it was and as it is falsely remembered. Narrative accounts that individuals give
continues this deconstruction, as their experiences in dealing with the mystique and
strategies of handling it are revealed. Guided by feminist and post-modernist approaches,
this in-depth analysis is based on a qualitative study comprising interviews with
individuals from 6 different family forms. The results show that families are constructed
predominately in terms of deficits, with the idealized nuclear family serving as a goal that
is ultimately unattainable. Families describe their strategies of dealing with this in terms
of performance, compensation, or pride. Consideration of this guides one to the
understanding of difference not as a fact but rather as a process that a patriarchal and
heteronormative culture creates and uses to constitute itself.
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